SZCZESNY: America needs more jobs ... and also a raise

No one doubts the U.S. economy is in need of a boost. Moreover, for the first time in perhaps a generation, the issue of the wages and benefits of everyday working stiffs is coming up as a source of concern as a growing body of evidence suggests Americans aren't paid enough to keep the economy growing.

Yes, America needs more jobs, just like Mitt Romney said during the recent presidential campaign.

But the Democrats, and particularly their union allies, are also correct: Americans also need a raise.

Advertisement

Depending on how you slice the data, wages of blue-collar workers have stayed flat for the better past of 30 years, going all the way back to the 1980s.

The rise of the global economy and the resulting downward pressures on wages for workers in key industries such as autos and steel have had a tremendous impact on blue collar workers all across the United States.

Moreover, for the past decade, the wages of white-collar workers in the service and knowledge industries have gone flat, leaving even more Americans struggling to pay their bills. The housing bubble helped and the resulting "wealth effect," covered over the problem for several years, but when the bubble burst in 2008, millions of Americans were left in debt.

The American struggle with debt has now slowed the economic recovery, leaving the unemployment rate stubbornly high and suppressing the plans of many businesses and companies to recruit and hire new employees.

Of course, some workers are hired, but the wages of both new college graduates and new entrants to the labor force have been held down by the trends and policies put in place long ago before anyone had ever heard of the fiscal cliff.

Despite what your average politician might think, ordinary Americans understand the nature of the trends and know something is out of whack in the economy.

It's not that people want more stuff some conservatives have suggested.

But they do want the rewards spawned by the economy distributed more fairly.

The increasingly unfair distribution of the rewards for hard work also have proven troubling to Americans and was one of the key reasons, I suspect, why President Barack Obama easily won re-election last month.

Americans know they need a raise and believe they stand better chance of getting one under Barack Obama than under his Republican challenger from the hedge fund and private equity industry -- where high-flying executives have benefited inordinately from the way rewards have been distributed in past three decades.

The notion Americans need a raise taken hold only among university trained economists.

The recently protests among workers at Wal-Mart and fast food restaurants are symptomatic of an underlying unrest among working Americans that politicians and executives ignore at their peril.

Unions have come under enormous pressure in recent years and have ceded much of their traditional influence. It's no secret, for example, the wages paid members of the United Auto Workers are increasingly geared to the nonunion auto plants in the South, noted Pat Sweeney president of UAW Local 5960 in Orion Township.

But that hasn't stopped some political figures from ordering up more of the same.

A highly partisan group of Republican legislators is now pushing right-to-work legislation as a panacea. But Michigan businesses have been adding jobs since the end of 2009, according to the University of Michigan.

Meanwhile, the Michigan AFL-CIO has distributed a briefing paper that right-to- work doesn't deliver anything in the way of economic growth. They cite the experience of the state of Oklahoma, which has been a right-to-work state since 2001.

Unemployment in Oklahoma more than doubled after the right-to-work legislation was adopted and manufacturing employment and relocations into the state actually declined. New companies coming into the state fell by one-third in the decade passage of right to work, according to the AFL-CIO.

Given the facts, it appears some Republicans are pushing an agenda that will do nothing to improve the lot of working people. It could actually wind up making it worse by diminishing the ability of some unions to negotiate pay increases, which are needed to help get the broader economy moving again.